This is our second edition of this book. It contains extra material (photographs, a foreword by Father Hugo's niece, Rosemary, and "The Story of the Missing Imprimatur"). It may be purchased by following THIS LINK.

Published in 1947, A Sign of Contradiction tells us what the Christian life should be and what it should not be. It does so by recounting the history of a seven-day silent retreat that Fr. Onesimus Lacouture, S.J., had been preaching during the 1930’s to priests in Canada and the United States. Though developed from the Spiritual Exercises of St.  Ignatius of Loyola, the retreats had aroused such fierce opposition that the Jesuit superior in 1939 forbade Fr. Lacouture to give them. In this book, Fr. Hugo, a priest of the Pittsburgh Diocese, was defending these silent retreats, which he also had preached, but in the 1940’s and to the laity. The most famous promoter of the retreats was Dorothy Day, co-founder with Peter Maurin of the Catholic Worker. She had made the retreat under Fr. Hugo and wrote about him in her books.

Meant only for private distribution, A Sign of Contradiction was a kind of open letter to Fr. Hugo’s fellow priests. But ordered by his bishop to destroy copies of the book, Fr. Hugo obeyed. The material in the book was too honest about what was wrong with the priesthood and the Church, and so the message had to be suppressed. Yet the message, a  timely and prophetic witness then, is still so today. Fr. Hugo was the friend of ordinary lay Catholics trying to live the Gospel in 1947, and he is the same friend of modern-day Catholics trying to live that same holy life in the Catholic Church of today.

The companion books to A Sign of Contradiction, authored by Fr. Hugo, are also available from Castle of Grace. You Are Gods! and Applied Christianity contain the conferences of the retreat. Nature and the Supernatural contains Fr. John’s rebuttals of various critics who misunderstood the retreat, and is a veritable compendium of Catholic teaching on the spiritual life. Each volume contains a foreword by Fr. Hugo’s niece, Rosemary Hugo Fielding.